Tech firms dominate top brands

Technology brands dominated this year's Interbrand Best Global Brands index, with IBM, Microsoft and Nokia dominating the top five.

In all, 22 technology firms dominated this year's chart, reflecting the strength of the technology market over the past 12 months.

The index, which continued to be headed up Coca-Cola at $66.67bn (£36.42bn) saw Microsoft and IBM change places.

Microsoft saw its brand value grow by one per cent over the past year to $59bn (£32.23bn), but failed to hold off IBM, which saw its value shoot up by three per cent in the same period to $59.03bn (£32.24bn), leaving Microsoft in third place.

Nokia and Intel retained their positions in the top ten at fifth and seventh respectively. However, the top ten saw a new entrant in the form of Google, but its value was still far behind that of Intel and Nokia and more than half that of Microsoft and IBM's at $25.59bn (£13.98bn) – a jump in value of 43 per cent.

Elsewhere, HP came in 12th, while Cisco, Samsung and Oracle ranked at 17th, 21st and 23rd respectively. The firm that saw the second largest climb in its brand value after Google was Apple at a 24 per cent rise over its value in 2007. Its jump from 33rd to 24th means it has leapfrogged both Dell (32nd) and Sony (24th), as well as software vendor SAP (31st).

Canon (36th) remained stationary, while Nintendo saw a climb of four places to 40th. Other names in the list included Philips (43rd), Xerox (59th), Blackberry (73rd), Panasonic (78th) and Motorola (87th).